Larsblog - beer

If I say "domesticated animals", yeast is perhaps not the first
thing that springs to mind, but it was actually one of the first
organisms to be domesticated. Evidence of domesticated yeast goes back
at least 4000 years. Yeast has been produced commercially since
at least the early 19th century, and fairly quickly drove out the
private strains that people used to keep at home.
...

It's a well-kept secret that in Norway there
exists a homebrewing tradition completely
separate from the modern homebrewing that's taken off in the last few
decades. The traditional homebrewers don't make porter and IPA,
instead they make stjørdalsøl, konnjøl, maltøl and
other old styles that hardly anyone outside of Norway ever heard of.
Michael
Jackson visited some of these brewers back in 1995, but since then
things have been quiet.
...

When I landed in Riga, I have to admit I was more curious about the
state of Latvian beer than about the city itself. Specfically, I
wanted to know whether there were beers of
the Lithuanian farmhouse ale type being brewed in
Latvia. My sources were telling me no, but I figured there's always a
chance. If nothing else, it should be fun to search.
...

I've made a point of never discussing definitions, because all
definitions are tautologies. That is, a definition can never be
wrong. If I say, "I define horse to be 'any creature which has
three legs and one horn'", then nobody can tell me that's wrong. I'm
simply notifying you that this is how I use the term. What you can say
is that nobody else uses the term that way, and that you don't believe
there are a whole lot of things which can be called horses under my
definition.
...

I think everyone will agree that for Lithuania to
be one of the world's great beer cultures is a
bit surprising. For years I've been wondering why this would be, and
now I'm finally in a position to propose an answer. And it is really a
bit of a puzzler. Right north of the border is Latvia, where they
speak a related language, and share the same Soviet heritage, but not
the beer culture. Why?
...

After the blog posts about my Lithuanian beer
tour Bryan D. Roth invited me to do a post
for The
Six-pack Project. The idea is to get different bloggers to pick
six beers from some country to present what that beer culture has to
offer. Having written a lot about different Lithuanian breweries and
styles in general, but little about the specific beers, I decided this
might be a good way to give a more direct idea of what Lithuanian beer
is like.
...

Now that I've visited Lithuania three times, and finally gotten to
actually meet some of the brewers, I feel I am at last beginning to
understand a least a little of Lithuanian beer. This post is my
attempt to do a little analysis and put what I've learned into some
kind of order.
...

I've already told the story of how the
"tasting" at Joalda went somewhat
off the rails, but there's so much left to say I need another blog
post. From the outside the brewery looks like a private dwelling, with
a normal house, a little garden pavilion, and something like a
combined barn and garage. That, of course, is the brewery.
(This is part 5 of
the Lithuanian brewery tour.)
...

We roll into Biržai, a small, slightly run down, provincial
town in northern Lithuania. It's famous in Lithuania as "the capital
of beer", both for all the home brewers, and for the commercial
brewers in the town. Biržų
Alus, which we're visiting, is clearly no small brewery, since
it's housed in a cluster of older buildings around a big yard.
(This is part 4 of
the Lithuanian brewery tour.)
...

Suddenly, we turn off the road, to stop next to a white-brick barn,
decorated with beery graffiti text and drawings. We pass through an
opening into a kind of roofed terrace with wooden tables and benches,
walls made of woven branches. It's simple, rough, and so pleasing to
the eye that I involuntarily say "wow", and not for the last time.
(This is part 3 of
the Lithuanian brewery tour.)
...